In a statement to the DCW, the girl said she was staying in a hotel in nearby Patel Nagar and went out for a walk on the night of December 14 but couldn’t find her way back. She flagged down an auto and told the driver to drop her at the hotel. She was instead taken to a dimly-lit, isolated stretch and allegedly raped by the driver inside the auto..

A 19-year-old German national was allegedly raped by an auto rickshaw driver and molested by his friends in central Delhi’s Prasad Nagar in December, two days before the city marked the third anniversary of the December 16 gang rape.

The girl said she was too scared to report the incident then and returned to Maharashtra where she runs an NGO.

On February 5, she wrote to the Delhi Commission for Women which encouraged her to approach the Delhi Police. A case of rape was registered on February 24 but the girl refused to get the portrait of the accused made, sources said.

In a statement to the DCW, the girl said she was staying in a hotel in nearby Patel Nagar and went out for a walk on the night of December 14 but couldn’t find her way back. She flagged down an auto and told the driver to drop her at the hotel. She was instead taken to a dimly-lit, isolated stretch and allegedly raped by the driver inside the auto.

“She said she somehow managed to get away but he followed her in the auto to another street and this time was accompanied by other men. They started molesting her but she bit the tongue of one of the men. He yelled and she too started shouting, causing enough commotion to scare them away,” a DCW official told HT.

The girl said she found her way to a main road and sat down on the sidewalk where a man offered to help her and dropped her at the hotel in his vehicle, but she didn’t tell him about the rape. Shaken by the ordeal, the victim went back to Maharashtra.

She later wrote to the DCW and returned to the capital to record her statement with the police on February 20. A case was finally registered on February 24 – more than two months after the alleged rape.

Police said a case could have been filed sooner had the commission approached them as soon as they received the victim’s letter. They said they could have sent a team to Maharashtra to record her statement and she needn’t have come all the way back to Delhi.

“The hotel staff were called for clarification and they said the girl was staying at the hotel with a male friend. They said she was calm and composed when she returned to the hotel. We have initiated an inquiry into the matter to ascertain the chain of events that is still unclear as the woman has been contradicting her statements. We have initiated a probe and will investigate the matter thoroughly,” a police officer said.